All Content

About

Mother’s Day 2016

When you wake up how are you changed little boy What ropes and pulleys are now joined in your mind and swaying For each new ability a new rung on your inner monkey bars Your voice which comes spilling out of your smile Your small smile And later your grin The anemones that your hands become fingers curling in and blooming out How must it feel when suddenly movement or sensations are newly available to you An unfamiliar room you find yourself in that you yourself are building This is why children love blocks Love tinker toys Love joining two hard bits that seem unchanging to make a changed third thing Baby if you will build I will bake you the warm bricks and hand them to you like cupcakes Bang the world’s pieces together sweetie Slam your eyelashes up and down Let your drawbridge mouth release horns and horses and also mandolin-strumming pacifists who will never hold a sword

She’s failing Biology and I can’t help feeling there’s some poetic justice in that F, this child whose biology failed her the day her biological mother placed her in my arms. She’s the anti-biology child and I’m the not-natural mother. Language, too, fails us. She lies down beside me, her long hair hiding her face, her breath warming my arm. She wants me to say it’s okay, F or no F. Fifteen years ago she was the yawning baby I bathed in the hospital nursery and swaddled in a pink blanket. I didn’t give birth to her, not with my body, but I witnessed the flutter of her eyelids like mothwings, the bow of her mouth. Rain begins and through the open window we hear it first in the leaves of the trees and then as it patters against the driveway. We hear frogs. The smell of blossoms drifts over us. “When will this end,” she says and though I know she means something likehomework or high school, I cup my hand over the crown of her head as I did when she was an infant, when the tender fontanel made her seem so vulnerable, made me so ache with love for her. How could I say, that it was just more life, that we want it to go on and on?

When you have the mother who plays the same Chopin étude on the piano over and over until it is perfect as a Champagne bubble ascending a crystal goblet, that is different

than when you have the mother who thinks she is Callas and sings in her bedroom all day, never goes outside, throws jars and bottles at the door when the bell rings. Different

than the mother who lives in the house in between these two, who is fat, whose hair is corkscrews, whose hands are raw with wind and soap as she pins white sheets on the line, smiles at the clouds and tells you

they are in the shapes of rabbits today. Later, she will take down the sheets, frozen stiff as cardboard, smooth them warm and soft against her belly, call you to help her fold, in half

in half again, a dance, until there is a pile in the basket that she lifts onto her hip, carries into the house as if it holds a baby she found hidden under a bush.

Word Problems “I’m a numbers man,” my uncle said when the doctor revealed that his sister my mother had a one percent chance of surviving, her lungs scarred and hardened, the tender pink walls an impermeable meat. “One out of one hundred isn’t so bad.” He knew this because he was a physicist. “She’s suffering,” the doctors said, pointing to the dozen thick tubes piercing her stomach, limbs, throat, explaining how bright beams of pain can break through the densest cloud cover of drugs. What were the odds that he would have to make this decision? About whether to bet it all on a losing hand, pretend that this woman, her collapsed body inflated by machines, her face an uncooked dough would somehow awaken, become human again, a princess released from a spell? This was mine, her only child, next of kin the one she left years ago when she realized she couldn’t take care of herself or a kid. I stood by her bed and counted the times her chest rose and fell, remembering how it felt to say goodbye to someone who was already gone.

Making up my daughter’s bed with sheets fresh from the dryer, I’m taken by a thankfulness both profound and daily, ordinary as the grace said over a bowl of soup, or the every-night prayer of a child,Now I lay me down to sleep. Not just for food or sleep, but for this, too, I want to give thanks, for this simple act of preparation, for all it is made of, for the makers of sheets and mattresses and dryers and bedframes. I’m not sure where it has come from, this feeling, but this morning making this bed needs to be more than just another chore checked off the to-do list. So I give thanks for my daughter, who will be home this weekend, and for my mother, who taught me to make a bed, whose daily repetitions of all homely work made me feel cared for. I give thanks for my hands, for my shoulders, and arms, and hips, for my lower back, which is a little achy just now. I give thanks for the work of tugging the sheets to smooth out the wrinkles, for the work of tucking in the bottom and sides to make it snug. I pull up the cover and I give thanks for the pillows as I plump them and place them at the head of the bed, as I imagine my daughter lying down here. I give thanks for all that we take for granted, for my own bed, and nightfall, and for the labor that makes sleep sweet.

You can see more of Angelica Paez’s glorious collages at her website and in her Artist Watch feature here at Escape Into Life, so please click those links below. Click on each poet’s name to see more of her work here at EIL! Happy Mother’s Day from Escape Into Life.

A Tribute To The Founder

Chris' dream was to feature and support artists all over the world. So in place of donations, please visit the EIL Art Store and shop items by our featured artists. Your support is extremely appreciated.